Tag Archives: culture-features

As vast swaths of Los Angeles County burned this week, with uncontrolled wildfires killing at least 10 people and destroying upward of 9,000 structures, residents and politicians understandably looked to assign blame. And in a drought-afflicted state where access to water is a particularly contentious issue, many argued that mismanagement …

Tara Roth works in Los Angeles as a philanthropic executive. She lives in the Palisades with her 13-year-old son Dane. This is her account, as told to writer Claire Hoffman, of fleeing the Palisades fires on Jan. 7. The night before, I wasn’t feeling well. A fever and a cold. …

The deadly wildfires sweeping across Los Angeles County have already claimed at least five lives and forced tens of thousands of residents to evacuate — in some cases having to abandon their vehicles and flee on foot. So far, five active fires covering a total of more than 29,000 acres …

A gray Los Angeles morning is nothing unusual in what passes for winter out here. But today, barely a week into the new year, it was a dense glut of smoke that darkened the sky, choking the air with ash. Where the sun broke through, it was the hazy and …

S hari Franke’s memoir starts, fittingly, with an Instagram story. As police officers forced the front door of her family’s home open with a battering ram, Shari captured the surreal scene, later posting it to her account for her 621,000 followers. “This moment, this climax of my family’s descent into …

T he hit man called himself Mr. Perfect. He had been given the list. He wanted the easiest one first. He’d also need a getaway car, a fake ID, and a place to drop the gun. The man who hired him went by Mero Wero. He said he would take …

A new year brings with it a plethora of new weird moments to acknowledge and even more to ignore. There’s the upcoming sociopolitical scene: grappling with the malcontent that’s led Donald Trump to the White House again, bracing for deportations, corporate marauding, and more cultural upheaval. But there’s also a …

There’s zero concrete evidence that the @AdrianDittmann account on X, formerly Twitter, is controlled by site owner Elon Musk. But since 2023, many users have convinced themselves that the billionaire is masquerading as this now-prominent influencer, using a pseudonymous identity to sing his own praises. The conspiracy theories have only …

Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that a Louisiana resident had been hospitalized with the first severe case of avian influenza — also known as “bird flu” — in humans. A total of 65 other people in the United States had contracted the H5N1 …

It takes a lot of work to keep a franchise alive for decades, and nobody knows this better than the co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Kevin Eastman. For 40 years, Eastman has shepherded the IP that he and co-writer Peter Laird launched back in 1984, although there’s been …